Ranking all 20 2021/22 Premier League home kits

Dave Tickner
2021 Premier League home kits

Twenty Premier League teams so 20 kits ranked. Find out how biased we are against your team…

 

20) Watford
I’m sorry but this is quite simply not a Premier League home shirt. It absolutely, positively reeks of Carabao Cup first round.

 

19) Liverpool
It’s a season of risk-taking kits this year, and inevitably not all will pay off. Liverpool kits are at their best when boasting a classic look or even a direct and unapologetic nod to the past. You could concoct some cod-philosophical argument here about the city’s fondness for its past and often cloying sentimentality of its nostalgia but you’ll not catch me falling into that trap. It’s just that a standard Liverpool kit is a thing of great power and they’ve had some brilliant, brilliant kits over the years that lend themselves to knowing nods. That said, we’re great admirers of Trying Something with a football kit and there are lots of great examples this season. Sadly, this just isn’t one of them. The orangey-red details just don’t sit right with me, and despite a general fondness for diagonals and zigzags the combination of the two here doesn’t pay off. Brave and bold and admirable but also sadly just a bit sh*t.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain Liverpool

 

18) Brentford
We try really hard not to knock marks off for dodgy sponsor logos because everyone has a horribly ugly sponsor these days, it’s a sadly necessary part of the game, and we’d rather reward those few shirts that manage to make the sponsor logo not look sh*t. That said, this one is particularly sh*t and screams Championship. Placed on a shirt that is determinedly neither nowt nor summat and it quickly becomes the defining element of the whole thing. Good for the sponsor, but not for everyone else. Collar somehow manages to be both boring and fussy. You’re competing with the big boys now, Brentford, and this is all a bit meh.

 

17) Leicester
For reasons I can’t fully understand or explain, this just screams Birmingham City to me even though the gold detailing should eliminate that possibility. Pretty sure this is my fault not the kit’s, but I’m still docking points because it’s annoying me. Nobody ever said this list was anything other than arbitrary.

 

16) Leeds
Very clean, very smart, but that slightly fussy collar is making our tits twitch. And not in a good way. Not bad, but that canary yellow doesn’t quite land and sadly in this high-class field it’s a bottom-half-of-the-table effort for the upwardly mobile Whites.

 

15) Tottenham
More than any other club, Spurs seem to lurch from one extreme to the other with their home shirts. Maybe it’s that the plainer ones just look so much plainer in white, and the fussy ones that much fussier. ‘Plain white T-shirt’ is somehow more damning a complaint than plain blue or red. Maybe it’s also because some of the attempts at detailing over the years have been so disastrous. But what is beyond doubt is that any Spurs home kit will always prompt one of two angry reactions. It’s either ‘Why have they added so much [colour that isn’t white] to it? It’s just too busy and fussy, how can they get something so easy so wrong?’ or ‘Why is it just a plain white T-shirt? Not paying 70 quid for that.’ In a year when so many others have gone bold with their home kits, Spurs have gone entirely the other way. That is a plain white T-shirt. It’s a perfectly nice one, but it is what it is. Yet, while we’re reluctant to give away too many spoilers for the second part of this kit rundown, we should also note that Spurs have, ahem, more than made up for such mundanity elsewhere.

 

14) Manchester United
A plain white round collar always just feels like a lazy p*ss-take on a shirt that costs 70 notes. And for for our money, while we’re on the subject, adidas stripes look better down a whole sleeve rather than just on the shoulders on single-colour shirts. There are few overtly bad home kits knocking around the top flight this year, and this certainly isn’t one either. It’s fine. But a bit meh. Like Anthony Martial.

Anthony Martial Man Utd

 

13) Brighton
The pinstripes have gone and a return to classic Brighton stripes sits well on this classic v-neck look. You can go bold or traditional with your kit and this is as traditional as it gets. Both bold and traditional can work, and this works. Also probably takes top spot across the entire division for ‘unobtrusive sponsor’s logo’. A very solid effort all round for the Seagulls.

 

12) Aston Villa
Say what you like about this shirt, it is unmistakably an Aston Villa shirt. Not as simple as you’d think, because there is an almost indefinably subtle yet crucial difference between a Villa shirt and a West Ham shirt that should mean it’s possible to tell which is which even if all the logos are removed. This is a Villa shirt. So well done everyone. We quite like the stripes, and Jack looks absolutely tremendous in it doesn’t he?

 

11) Everton
Love the ‘dazzle-comouflage inspired’ pattern, not entirely sure about the overall colour which appears just slightly too washed out to be properly Everton (which would be washed-up hahaha tremendous). Hummel are a great bunch of lads, though, and this is a predictably lovely piece of work. Another reasonably unobtrusive sponsor also helps. Don’t know exactly when, why or how used-car hawkers started to eat in to the far-east-gambling-company monopoly on Premier League shirt sponsorship, but it’s certainly a thing.

 

10) Chelsea
We would previously have put Chelsea absolutely top of the league for ‘team least likely to do something wild with their home shirt’. It’s neither compliment nor criticism, but Chelsea home shirts tend to be rock solid. They usually look good – in fact we’re struggling to think of an obviously bad one in recent memory – but rarely take risks. Just good, solid blue shirts. Whatever you think of this shirt, and it’s going to divide opinion, you have to admire Chelsea and Nike for taking a risk. We’re not fully convinced it’s paid off, but after decades of 8/10 shirts they’ve gone all out for a 10/10 and you have to admire that commitment and risk-taking even if it has fallen short. We really like the yellow zig-zaggy stripe thing, a Nike design that will be familiar to anyone who watched Euro 2020, and the main colour is great. But all the geometric details might just be a gamble too far. Definitely points for effort, though.

Tammy Abraham

 

9) Wolves
You have to go completely and absolutely insane to make a mess of a Wolves home shirt. That old gold can mask all manner of sins. Castore have not gone mad. This is a very good Wolves home shirt.

 

8) West Ham
Nice retro feel which always feels like good solid ground for West Ham. Impossible, though, to shake the notion that umbro have done two claret-and-blue kits in the Premier League this year and this one is a distant second best and the one that feels out of step with the season’s general trend towards bold shapes and prints and looking to the future rather than the past. Given the relative current states of Burnley and West Ham,  it really adds to the feeling of the kits being the wrong way round.

 

7) Norwich
I love Norwich kits. Just a great colourway and historically not remotely afraid to have a bit of fun with it. This one is good, and the green bits on the sleeves look a little bit like wings which is probably deliberate I guess but is definitely very on brand and very good. The only one of the promoted teams really bringing anything to the table home-kitwise, so fair play to the Canaries for that.

 

6) Manchester City
Yes. A good kit, this. Manages to be plain and simple yet not boring and the minimalist collar is particularly effective. The 93:20 reference to the 2011/12 season a decade on is a nice touch, although carrying the calculator typeface on into the shirt numbers looks an error; the Premier League’s insistence on generic naming and numbering isn’t always for the best, but we’re grateful for it here. Nitpicking if nitpick we must: the white panels on the side are ever so slightly too broad.

 

5) Arsenal
Blue on an Arsenal home shirt is a risk, and this particular bright blue risks the whole thing going a bit Crystal Palace. Works perfectly here, though, giving just the right amount of pop to a classic design. Is there, though, too much white on it? We’ve given this a great deal of thought and gone back and forth on it and concluded that no, it’s fine. Adidas and Arsenal always seem to go well together, and this year is no exception. The best of the year’s more classically styled efforts.

Arsenal-with-manager-Mikel-Arteta

 

4) Southampton
Southampton in hummel kit is just powerfully and reassuringly correct in this terrifying and uncertain world. Spurs next, please. This is great. Love the chevron detailing through the stripes along with the classic sleeve work.

 

3) Burnley
The Clarets are generally a pretty distant third when it comes to claret-and-blue Premier League kits, but they’ve left the bigger guns of Villa and West Ham absolutely trailing in their wake this time. West Ham in particular want to be having a word with Umbro, who have done them a dullness of a home kit and then given Burnley this absolute smasher. Those sleeves!

 

2) Newcastle
Castore’s first Newcastle kit is a very good one. If there’s a criticism it’s that we’d like to see another stripe or two on there – these are very, very fat stripes. But it looks smart as all hell, and the collar is glorious, instantly evoking memories of Keegan and Ferdinand and Ginola and a time when everything in Newcastle was just a bit more fun. Put a big blue Newcastle Brown star on the front of this and it probably gets top spot.

 

1) Crystal Palace
Should Palace’s home kit have diagonal stripes on it? Absolutely not. Does it work? Absolutely yes. The darker blue edging between the diagonals also looks lovely, while the whole thing is obviously a madly successful tribute to the various excellent sash-based shirts in the Eagles’ history. This is a very good year for Premier League home kits in our very considered and important opinion, and it’s particularly gratifying to see so many of the best of them carrying an element of risk. Now Palace just have to hope the similarly bold risk of replacing reliable but dull Roy Hodgson with Patrick Vieira pays off just as handsomely.

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